Normal medal service is resumed

At the end of last year's World Athletics Championships in Edmonton Max Jones, the British performance director, reflected gloomily on countless tales of woe.

He gazed at an overall medal table which read "Britain 2, Belarus 2" and prayed aloud that we were talking about a "blip here, not a trend".

Now, as he pondered a final and delicious European Championship gold medal scoreline in Munich which ran "Germany 2, Britain 7", it seemed fair to say normal service had been resumed from our most successful international sporting invaders

Not that Jones needed to say much this time; his athletes were ready to bang the drum for themselves. Quite right too after their remarkable fortnight's labours.

"We came here tired, yet still performed," boomed Jamie Baulch

"Some of our team have had about 10 races this last two weeks with the Commonwealth Games as well, while other European nations could chill out and prepare solely for this. It showed how talented British athletes are."

Matt Elias, his Welsh mate, nodded his blue-topped head.

"We got a lot of bad press after Edmonton, people saying we were in the doldrums. Well, we've showed here that's not true.

"We've had young athletes coming through, like Lee McConnell (400m bronze) and Jade Johnson (long jump silver) and the old guard still doing the business like Steve Backley and Colin Jackson.

"We've shown that British athletics is at the forefront of British sport and hopefully people will get behind us now leading up to the Olympics."

Or as Daniel Caines put it simply: "I think we've made Britain proud."

It seemed fitting that this bullish stuff should come from three-quarters of a 4x400 metres relay quartet - Jared Deacon was the quiet one - who had applied the golden seal to proceedings, uniquely for the fifth successive edition.

They say that when Yorkshire's strong, so is English cricket. So it is that when the 4x400m boys fire, you can't usually find much wrong with British athletics.

Even more than the triumph of the sprint relay lads who'd been down to their last four because Allyn Condon and Jason Gardener sulked all the way home after not being selected for the heats, the dynamism of this patchwork 4x400m team outfit best underlined the spirit of a team which collected seven golds, one silver and six bronze.

These championships may have lost some lustre since they became squeezed in between World Championship years. Yet, as Jones pointed out, Backley, Ashia Hansen and Paula Radcliffe produced performances which surely would have won them world golds and Dwain Chambers and Jackson also delved into the top drawer.

In Backley's case, it's worth pondering that his four consecutive European javelin golds have been won against the best in the world.

It's just an accident of timing which means that they are not four Olympic golds and that he's not now sitting at the right hand of Steve Redgrave. In my book, he's up there and his fifth round monster throw to snatch gold on Friday night made him my man of the championships.

No argument about the woman of the championship, of course.

Radcliffe's 10,000m solo splash was the sort of wonder, reckoned Jones, which would not just inspire Britain's top endurance runners but might just inspire a whole generation of young kids to think "I'd like a piece of that".

Wait for it; that will mean hundreds of kids running round Hyde Park in unison, shaking their heads for all they're worth.

There were no cheap medals here. When a record 18 different countries can win gold, from the first Turkish woman, 1500m victor Sureyya Ayhan, to the first Israeli, pole vaulter, Alex Averbukh, then it's obvious that even if Europe's power might be declining globally in athletics, its championship is more competitive than ever.

More nations than ever before, 29, shared the medals.

Averbukh's though was the most poignant. Thirty years since the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Olympics here, the Siberian-born vaulter's victory, the first for Israel in any major athletics event, came on the eve of a special memorial service for the victims.

He cried as the flag was raised and he was not the only one.

Like Manchester, it was a splendid-well-supported event. Unlike Manchester, some of the meeting organisation was woeful, with the plight of the Irish sprinter who did well to avoid being beheaded by a stupidly-positioned TV camera taking the biscuit.

What both events shared, though, was some exhilarating running, jumping and flinging in the rain.

"Two good games. Tremendous for recruitment into the sport, for sponsors, for TV...." enthused Jones.